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Note Nap Time
Our topic is all about something that we can thank our kindergarten teachers for. I am a 41-year old guy who still enjoys kindergarten. This episode is all about like your Note Nap Time. Honestly, it’s a little bit more advanced than that. One of the great things is as we are growing, as we’re getting older, as we’re growing up, one of the things that’s ingrained into us, especially if you’ve got kids or young ones or things like that, is having some schedule to follow. Especially when you’re raising young kids or you’ve got nieces and nephews are people that have kids, it’s all about a schedule. We can all agree to do that. Waking the kids up, going to bed at the right time, keeping them on track for dinner. If you don’t have kids, you don’t realize that you can’t stay up until 2:00 AM every day with your kids because they don’t function properly the next day out there. Think back to our early development things. Maybe some of you can’t remember that far back. I know I have a hard time. I was trying to think who my kindergarten teacher was and it was Mrs. Summers. I went to a private school. It was at Brighton Park, it was an Elizabeth Street School. Then we moved out. I started going to private school from basically the kindergarten through third grade before I went into a public school in fourth grade.
I can think back and I can think of all my friends. As we traveled with people that have kids, it’s all about the schedule. One of the most important schedules that’s I wish we had as adults was nap time. That’s why we’re going to call this episode Note Nap Time. I think as adults, sometimes we wish we had the afternoon nap time. We wish we had that spot to go and lay down on the pad for 30 minutes to close your eyes and relax a little bit. What’s funny is we all have our schedule. We are all in control of our schedules if we think about it. A lot of us let our schedules control us versus us controlling our schedules. What I mean by our schedule controls us is that you have nothing. You let your day schedule things out for you. You don’t plan anything and you roll with the punches. You wonder at the end of the day, “I got so busy. I’m so bombarded. I didn’t get anything done.” You didn’t get anything done based on what your activities were. I’ll give a great example. I had a scheduled call with somebody. They were twenty minutes late. They couldn’t figure it out. I tried to get them scheduled for something else. They have another schedule. I chuckled and said, “I’ll just follow up with an email later on. If they don’t have it scheduled, they don’t have it scheduled. It’s not going to work on our schedule.”
Organize Your Schedule
One of the most important things I can tell you as I talk to entrepreneurs is a fifteen-minute power nap is so nice. Power naps can be a variety of different things. It can be meditation, it could be hitting the gym for fifteen minutes, it could be going for a walk. What I’m trying to get at here is we all are busy. Everyone I know is extremely busy. I know I am. I know everybody is in busyness, but sometimes are you busy at being busy or are you actually busy at getting things done? I’m a big believer in goals. We have the busiest months left in the year and not just busy because of life. You’ve got a vacation. You have holidays. A lot of people are taking trips or either traveling with their family to see family or a family coming in. It’s the whole holiday shuffle. You’ve got to plan Halloween trips. You’ve got to look at, “What’s going on Black Friday? We’re going to go shopping.” There’s a whole shit show I like to call when it comes to holidays. It’s stressful for a lot of people because it’s chaotic. You have to roll with the punches. If you’re not flexible in what your schedule is this holiday season, you’re going to get run over. If I could say anything with you and you’re planning and you’re talking about what you’ll accomplish next year, more than anything else, look at what your schedule has done for you this year. Look at how organized you’ve been the last ten months and if that has been successful.
What do I mean by that? One of the great things that I learned early on was having a set schedule, not like in kindergarten. Kindergarten is great for kids. You have set schedules. We work best on a schedule. Whether you believe this or not, we all work better on a schedule. I know scheduling sucks. Some people do not like those constraints. “I don’t want to time block my schedule. I don’t want to work in an office. The reason I don’t work in work in an office is so that I don’t have to worry about my schedule.” That’s great, but you’re lying to yourself when you say you don’t work well on a schedule. Everybody does. Everybody works well if you plan things out. You get organized. One of the things I hate the most is somebody like, “I’m going to plan so that we can go buy the ticket. I’ll get to it later.” No, just get on the phone and buy the ticket. Get on the computer and buy the ticket, plan it out. Quit wasting time not planning all these actions. If you don’t plan your actions, your weekend will gobble it up, whether it’s watching the news, watching TV, painting, watching football or whatever. Your schedule will gobble up your free time. It will gobble up your productivity. The devil will allow you to drift if you let him, according to the words of Outwitting The Devil there.
Note Nap Time: If you don’t plan your actions for the week, your weekend will gobble it up.
I joke about nap time here in a little bit because sometimes many of us get overwhelmed throughout the day as we’re rocking and rolling and life is getting in. You’re trying to juggle too many plates. I find many entrepreneurs are doing that that are literally spinning the way too many plates in their business and in their lives. How do I know this? Because I’ve been there. What happens when you’re playing too many plates? We put ourselves on the back end, “I’ll get to the gym later. I’ll schedule a date night later.” I do not recommend you doing date night and your trips with your family or spouse. She’s one of the most important things that you do, with your kids or whatever it is. Those are very important things. What I’m trying to get at is look at your schedule. If you’re setting goals for next year, which many of us are, you have to look at what your schedule did this year for you and if you were productive on your schedule this year.
I’ll give you an example. I have two calendars up here. I have one for 2018 and then I have another one that’s half of 2018, half 2019 so I can transition and look forward six months at least. I am trying to plan my schedule maximizing my time as best as possible. One of the things that we’re doing this year is if I’m out speaking at a real estate club, we’re looking at having a live meetup either for the Note Closers Show or for an intro on note investing. Basically, local REIA meeting for the Note Closers groups across the country if I’m out at an event. If I’m out at Podfest, Podcast Movement, Traffic & Conversion Summit, or New Media Summit, I’m scheduling something to help maximize my time so I’m not traveling as crazy a schedule as I was this year. I’m on a flight number 35, 36 or something like that. I’ll probably look at my schedule. I might hit 40 flights for traveling anywhere for the rest of the year. I’m traveling to Cape Coral. I’ll probably end up roughly around south of 40 flights for the year. I am probably going to hit that number again next year, but we’re going to be a little more productive.
Getting Things Done
Some of the things that we do with me planning two-hour events if I’m away, “Here’s a meet and greet.” I’m trying to plan our schedule a little bit more effectively because I’m looking back at what we accomplished this year. This year has been great, I cannot complain. Life is good. We’ve gone through some changes and some things. The podcast itself affected us in a positive matter better than I thought it ever would. It’s helping us tweak what we’re doing for next year. What I want you to look back though is take a look at your day. Take a look at your week. There are specific things that we have to do each week. We have to get things done. What are you doing to get things done during the day? Are you waking up at the same time every morning? Are you going to bed at the same time at night? Do you have specific jobs or things that you do throughout the day? I’ll give you an example of this to help you get things done. Several years ago, I made it a big priority in my life for my health to kick in, for my health to be better. That was just not me saying, “My health will be good on January 1st.” It’s my New Year’s resolution. I had to put some action behind it.
What were my actions? I looked at my schedule and I said, “Instead of me doing the lunch appointments or working at my desk, one of the best things I can do is I can start working out at noon every day. The gym is nearby. The gym is on site here. It’s five minutes away. I can get stuff done. I can maximize my schedule.” People laugh a little bit like, “That means you’ve got to get dressed or undressed and get all sweaty.” What do I do? I wear my workout clothes to work in the morning. I wear workout shorts and a shirt or I bring a different shirt that I wear to work out with it. People crack up when I walk in like, “What the hell are you doing?” I’m wearing a pair of Nike Dri-FIT shirts. “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I do this.” They’re like, “What?” I don’t worry about image. I was talking to a guy as I was getting coffee. He’s in a three-piece suit looking all nice and he said, “What are you doing here?” I’m like, “This is what I do.” He’s like, “What?” He’s looking at me and I’m like, “I work out at noon every day.” He’s like, “Okay.”
Note Nap Time: If you can do something that helps you clone your material, your audience, or reach without you having to do a lot of work, then that’s a valuable tool.
Marketing Octagon
That’s the thing. I started planning every day I’m at the office from noon. It stays like that about 90% of the time, Monday through Friday. If I’m in the office, great. I’m doing that for the most part. Unless I got to catch a plane and traveling, then I don’t do it. Then I try to do that when I’m traveling. The beautiful thing about having a smartphone with video and using Zoom, I can live stream with Thomas Nee, my trainer. That was a priority. I have made big leaps and bounds in the last two years with that being a priority in my schedule. I don’t do lunch appointments because that’s a two and a half hour of wasted stuff. It’s not as productive as much. I want to try to maximize schedule. When you’re busy, you have to maximize your schedule on things. A lot of people ask out there, “You are killing it doing a lot of stuff.” The reason you see us killing it and doing a lot of stuff is that we have scheduled things. Shannon does a great job of going through and creating social media posts, posts for the podcast, posts that we target and posting in other areas where we use one thing and we use the marketing octagon to share it across different platforms.
We’re taking what we’re doing at once and reusing it. There are too many people out there doing one thing only in one thing only and that’s it. They’re not being smart about their marketing. They’re not being smart about their actions. The best thing I can tell you to do is look at your schedule. I try to be in the office every day by ten, sometimes at 9:00. Sometimes I sleep a little late. It depends on the schedule. Tuesday’s my later day to come in at 10:00. Usually, I’m rolling around 9:30 for the most part. My first half hour, here’s the plan. Then it’s marketing every day for what we do through the podcast or something to help us with marketing for that day. That is why we are successful at what we do. It’s why we help our audience. We focus on marketing each day. What’s the podcast episode? What’s that podcast that turns into a video, that turns into a blog post? That turns into an episode on iTunes and Stitcher that also becomes a video across the smart channel? I look at those things that I can tap into that will help me expand my reach, without me having to do extra work.
That’s one way to maximize your schedule. If you can do something that helps you clone your material or clone your audience or clone your reach without you having to do a lot of work, that’s a valuable tool to add, Buffer and Hootsuite. There are various simple things out there. Using Repurpose.io or Lively as ways to double your audience video views. Those things are important, valuable things for you to do. Networking is a great thing. A lot of people put it in their schedule. I get it if you have a full-time job. What you have to do with your full-time job is write that into your schedule. “I got to be at the office from nine to five.” Do you have an hour lunch? Yes. What can you do in that hour lunch break to help you fit your goals for the next year? Does that mean you need to pack your lunch and you run into the gym fast and knock out twenty minutes on the treadmill or twenty minutes on the elliptical? Do you change the clothes you wear? Maybe some of the workout pants. Do you do that or do you spend that time at lunch working on your email blasts or working on your LinkedIn profile and connect with asset managers?
What are those things that you’re doing to maximize that hour of things? Instead of sitting in traffic for an hour to go home, do you wait 45 minutes, work on something for your business, and then drive the fifteen minutes to get home because the traffic’s no longer bad? Do you have a 45-minute commute each way on the bus? Do you use that time to listen in or do you use it to market online with things? There’s a variety of things that you can do to help you maximize your schedule. It’s not all about taking naps. Sometimes you need to take a nap. There are days that before I got into my schedule, it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and I’m dragging. That’s normal, but I don’t drag any afternoon at 3:00. Why? Because of my metabolism boost. I’m working out from 12:00 to 1:00, I’m running to grab a juice or I’m eating something here, showering and then back here in the office. There are days where I don’t make it home fast to shower. I rinse off here at the office fast and dry up because if I brought food or I get bombarded with things, I don’t go through all my emails first thing in the morning. That’s one of the worst things you can do is to go in and look at your emails first thing in the morning in your office.
Note Nap Time: Sticking with your schedule keeps you from drifting all over the place.
What I try to do a couple things that actually I do not have on my phone that allow me to stay a little more focused is I don’t get my We Close Notes email on my cell phone. I get my text messages. I get my social media in my cell phone. When I leave the office at 6:00 or 7:00 or 9:00 at night, that’s when I look at my We Close Notes email. I don’t do it throughout the weekend unless I’m going to be here in the office. I don’t do it early in the morning. I don’t do it late at night while I’m sitting there watching TV or watching a movie or eating with Steph. I want that time. I’m still flipping over my phone. I’m reading some stuff up, check out some stuff on ESPN.com or respond to a LinkedIn thing, checking out some of the marketing stuff that’s popping up and coming up with ideas and stuff. You almost need to have a technology cutoff at 7:00 or 8:00 at night because we get so bogged. If we were watching movies, Steph picks a movie to watch. If it’s not exactly my ideal movie, that’s fine. I’ll watch it with you. The minute you start playing more time on your phone and watching the movie, “We’re going to go to something that I want to watch, something I want to enjoy.”
Effective Schedule
If you’re not going to watch it, if you’re not going to pick a movie and go do something in the house, I’m not just saying this. This is something that if I were to pick a movie and don’t watch, I expect her to change the channel. I expect her to adjust the schedule to help her see something out there. This is also important in what you’re planning throughout the day. Are you being effective and doing paperwork in the middle of the day or doing that in the evening? I had some people get upset that I didn’t send over updated agreements and stuff to them in the middle of the afternoon. No offense, I work on that at the end of the day. I work on that after 5:00, paperwork gets done to push to 5:00 unless it’s an absolute priority. That’s what I’m trying to get at. You have to look at what your schedule is and look at how effective your schedule has been for this year. You’re the only person that can handle that. You’re the only person who can handle it, who can handle the adjustment. You’re the one person that can tell you if your daily schedule has been great or not. Has it been productive? Has it not been productive? Do you have a crazy schedule? The more you can get on a normal schedule, the more productive you’re going to be. If you’ve got a job that’s hectic, I get that. It’s going to happen, but you have to try to figure some resemblance to a normal schedule.
I have friends who were firefighters. They work 24 on, 48 off. That allows them to get some stuff done during that day or whenever they’re on, they’re on. If it lands on a Tuesday, they’re on it Tuesday. My mom was an RN for years and has now been retired as a nurse. She would work the graveyard shift a lot of times. Graveyard shift, come home, see us kids off, then go to bed for four to five hours. Wake up at 1:00, 2:00 in the afternoon, get some work done and then get ready to go to be in the hospital by 6:00 or 7:00 at night for the graveyard shift from 7:00 to 7:00. She did that four days of the week. The other three days of the week were trying to be a normal schedule. The first day was always a little groggy for her. She was getting back on, but then the last two days were productive. Then she was going back to work, but she had a schedule as best as she could handle with things like this.
This is what I’m trying to get out there for those of you that I see that are drifting all over the place. Try to stick to your schedule. If you’re not getting time in the gym, it’s probably because you’re not scheduling it. If you’re not getting time to make phone calls to asset managers or sending an email out to your email list, it’s probably because you’re not scheduling things. If you are lazy, that’s fine. Be lazy. That’s what you choose to be, lazy. It’s okay. I had somebody call me up. He was like, “Scott, I don’t think I’m into this. I think I’m lazy. I’d rather take a nap in the middle of the afternoon versus reaching out to asset managers or sending an email blast out. I don’t feel like doing that anymore.” I’m like, “That’s your prerogative.” If you can get away with it, by all means, get away with it. If you don’t want to accomplish something, I know everyone here wants to accomplish some big things. We can learn a lot from our kindergarten teacher about nap time and scheduling things and look at your schedule.
I saw somebody. He was up in Rochester, New York talking about how the idea is that an eight-hour day was created with Henry Ford. We only need about a four-hour day these days to get as much stuff done with technology and everything that we have in this world. We need about three to four hours of productivity to get as much done as we did years ago. If you look at your schedule, you can get work from noon to 4:00 or 1:00 to 5:00 or 10:00 to 2:00 or 10:00 to 3:00. I guarantee you can get stuff done. We’ve been messing around with the schedule and I’ve been using Calendly to help us with bookings. I don’t take the phone calls. When someone schedules a call from me, it’s usually in the afternoon. Why in the afternoon? Because that’s when I’m most aware. I’m most aware between 2:00 PM and 5:00 PM. There are days that I’ll have a conference call after conference call, 30 minutes after 30 minutes with people. It usually lasts fifteen and then I get fifteen, twenty minutes of quick work done before I get the next phone call or fifteen to twenty minutes of action items. That’s what I do. I have action items that I get done throughout the day. Look at your schedule. If you can start if you have something that you can schedule every day, put it on the schedule. Take the time to start planning that stuff out. Trust me, you’re going to fail at it the next two months. You’re probably going to fail because of the holidays are going to put a freaking show in the middle of our schedule. It is what is.
Note Nap Time: There is nothing wrong with fitting in your power nap to your schedule. You’ll be surprised by what it does.
That’s what the schedule is all about. You got holidays coming, you got a cousin Randy coming or that stuff you got to worry about. People flying in and flying out, what are you cooking? Holiday trips, going to the Nutcracker. I hope Stephanie doesn’t buy another dozen Nutcracker this year. I can only hope. I’m trying to have a bit of fun with this. You have to take this seriously. By all means, take it seriously and I’m going to tell you, there are days you are going to fail. You’re going to fail every week. The idea is if you can start getting a little bit better this week, you’re further ahead. If you get 5% better this week, great. Get 5% better next week. Get 10% better in two weeks. Get 15% better in three weeks. A little bit of 5%, a little bit better. If you get 1% better each day, at least with maximizing your schedule and organizing things, you will look back and I guarantee you this. The most successful people that seem to get the most amount of stuff done are the ones that own their schedule and they own their time. They value their time like nothing else. When anybody values their time, they know that their time is worth and what they can get done with it. That’s why they’re not wasting time doing mediocre things. They’re not wasting time washing clothes. They’re not wasting time doing things that can be delegated to somebody else.
There are tools you can use. You can use Google Calendar. Some people are more about note-taking. This was a phenomenal thing that JPMorgan Chase did when I was a banker. We had a score sheet. What it was is from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, their time in the bank, what did you accomplish? Who’d you meet with? That was the thing. If you had a meeting with somebody, “Mr. Smith came in and wanted to talk about his checking account.” We put that down at 9:00. If we had big gaps, one of the things that we would focus on was calling out to our clients, calling out to our customers with bank or loan clients or investment clients. We’re trying to set up appointments with people. We always wanted to try to have at least 20 to 30 appointments each week with clients. Depending on the bank you are in, if you have a lot of foot traffic and especially if your bank was understaffed, you’ll have a difficult time with that. You have to try to maximize your schedule. Before my final six months at JPMorgan Chase, I was in one of the second busiest banks in Austin. It was South of the downtown branch. We should have run with four bankers and we ran with one or two. A lot of times, it was one. It was me and a lot of times, our bank manager was out or the assistant manager is out.
I was running all over the place doing a lot of things. Not to the teller aspect, but literally taking care of everybody’s business and scheduling things. I had to schedule appointments to be effective so I did not get bombarded with all the other BS that rolled in. We had the score sheet. Who did you meet with? What did you do this day? Sometimes people like planners. People like journals. People like a piece of paper. People like electronic. People like calendars. I don’t like counters on a phone because I’m not looking at it. It’s something you click on and look at it. I can but it’s not something that I’m going to see. It’s not a reminder. I like having, “What am I doing?” It’s one of the things I do before I leave the office. What do I have first thing in the morning? Do I have an interview? Do I have a talk with somebody? Do I have a podcast episode? Am I scheduled a phone call with somebody talking about investing? What am I doing first thing in the morning so that I can roll in and be prepared and know what I’m doing? I sleep well at night knowing, “I’m going to bed. Here’s what I’ve got done in my alarms are set.” I’ll wake up at 7:30 AM or 8:00 AM. I go do what I need to do. Nature calls, I’m sitting there reading, organizing, and then rock and rolling out.
If you look at your schedule and you need a nap time, schedule it in. If you need a fifteen, twenty-minute power nap, schedule it in. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re working for somebody, they may not want you to take a twenty-minute nap on their time, but if you need to go out to your truck or car. That power nap that you may be needing, schedule it in and you’ll be very surprised. Cody Cox does a great job every Friday with his Friday stroll. It’s on his schedule. He does it. He talks about what’s on his mind. He’s turning his stroll into a marketing piece that a lot of people are looking at on a regular basis or following them on it. That’s the smart thing about it. With him having a busy work schedule, he maximizes his Sunday night with his emails that go out so that it’s organized. It’s the same thing with us. Most of the time, we’re sending an email out at Sunday night to you for a Monday night’s webinar. Then taking that same email and pre-writing it so that’s ready to rock and roll for you come Monday. Especially in the morning or in the afternoon and then the course of the hour of the webinar beforehand. Little things can help you maximize your schedule to get the most amount of bang for your buck.
I’m not technologically savvy and that’s totally fine. If you’re struggling with some things, I guarantee these days there’s an app or some tool that you can use. Just reach out, “Here’s what I’m struggling with. Does anyone have a tool that I can use? Does anybody have a tool or an app or some program that I can use to help me with scheduling?” Go from there because that’s all-in success. The most successful people are the ones that have a scheduled down the path. They’ve got either a system supplementing them or they’ve got an app or they have a counter that they’re constantly plugging into to help be effective on what they need to get done. Go get things done and you’ll be a lot happier and a lot more productive. Once you get that stuff done, you’d be a lot closer at the top. Go out and make something happen.